Bow Your Head? Close Your Eyes? How to act when saying grace 101.

My guess is that this has been covered in another forum but I wanted to throw it out there;

So who among us has been the following situation: You are sitting at a friends or even a family's dinner table and everyone gets ready to say grace. Everyone bows their heads and or closes their eyes. What do you do? Do you close your eyes and or bow your head out of respect and think to yourself "omg this is such bs", or do you hold your atheist head up high with a kind of "suck-it" mentality I am not going to coddle you just because you expect me to, I'm an atheist dammit and proud of it!!!

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I politely and quietly wait for the religious incantations to cease before resuming to enjoy the company. I do not bow my head or close my eyes or pretend to be "one of them". I do enjoy it when children are present as they tend to look around at the chanting adults in bewilderment. Eventually, they will meet my gaze and we will exchange knowing smiles, as if only we are "in" on the joke.

My wife is Greek Orthodox, because I'm who I am she doesn't make it to church much. This last Easter she asked if I was going to say grace, so I gave her my rendition (two, four, six, eight, yea god, let's F'n eat). I was not asked to say grace and won't be for some time. Food was great.

At a friend or coworker's house, I would sit quietly at the table with my held held high.

However, I don't even do that much for family dinners anymore. Throughout my teens, even after I stopped going to church with my family, I would still come join them around the table, fold my arms (just a Mormon thing, apparently), close my eyes, and bow my head during dinner and holiday prayers out of respect. That transitioned to folding my arms and bowing my head with open eyes while looking around. I noticed everyone else always kept their eyes closed so eventually I stopped bowing my head entirely but kept folding my arms so my family could see me doing it before the prayer began.

Then I had kids and when they got old enough to "teach" how to pray, I just couldn't do it anymore. I said fuck it and decided to start my silent protest by walking into the kitchen instead of toward the table with my kids when everyone was called in for the prayer. To my surprise, I never got lectured. Perhaps my family thought I was trying to be polite by keeping the noisy toddlers quiet. As the years progressed and more of my family's younger generation came of age, my siblings eventually joined me in the kitchen followed by some cousins, their kids, and all our significant others.

At one point there was only my grandmother, my aunt, and my mother in the room to pray so they stopped praying entirely a few years ago. We've never discussed it, but I assume as soon as the "us" was larger than the "them" they felt foolish and stopped. Interesting how that happened now that I think about it. Great question!